Should Our Intelligence Apparatus Be Overhauled?

Feb 4, 2004

James J. Miner

Following 9/11, there were investigations into the intelligence gathering apparatus of the United States. There were allegations that plenty of warnings were given about impending disaster, and that those warnings went unheeded. There were calls for an overhaul within the intelligence community. Now, following the Iraq war, there is again an outcry over U.S. intelligence. This time, the outcry is that intelligence claims were overstated. The evidence for weapons of mass destruction and connections between the Hussein regime and Al Queda has largely proven unsubstantiated. What happened between then and now? Why has the tide turned, from complaints of the government ignoring warnings, to complaints that the government was over-reliant on patchy information? Should the intelligence community be overhauled? How do we fix it?

The intelligence community is intrinsically conservative. Any hint of suspicion is turned into “evidence”. The periodic raising of the national homeland security level is one example of this. Another example is the assessment of the Russian threat against the United States in the 1980’s. We were constantly reminded that the U.S.S.R. had surpassed the U.S. in terms of numbers of nuclear warheads, numbers of tanks, and numbers of conventional troops. The breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s revealed how much of a paper tiger it actually was.

This is as it should be. The function of the intelligence community should be the uncovering of hidden information. The evidence is often so sketchy that conclusions are difficult to make. Yet the cost of making the wrong conclusion is high. The natural tendency is to err on the side of caution. Every suspect finding must be treated seriously, often to the extent of transforming innocent situations into a grave threat. This is the source of the conservatism within the community. Making the wrong conclusion can be fatal.

All through the 1990’s and early 2000’s, there were gloomy forecasts that the new enemy was terrorism. There was the first bombing of the World Trade Center, there were the embassy bombings in Africa, there were the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. There were the pre-9/11 warnings. There was a tendency to ignore the threats, and for a while that strategy seemed to work. Yet none of that was enough to stop the disaster from happening. Perhaps all of the false positives caused the one true positive to be lost in the noise.

The reaction then was to swing the pendulum in the other direction. Instead of ignoring all threats, the Bush administration chose to treat many warnings seriously. This was a consequence of the outcry that resulted from 9/11. The U.S. government chose to construct a case for going to war in Iraq based on the intelligence it had. This conclusion turned out to be wrong. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and there was no Al Queda connection.

So, we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. We don’t seem to have a way to separate the wheat from the chaffe. We cannot differentiate the one threat that is real from all of the false threats. And, yet, to survive we must find a way to do this.

The function of intelligence is to produce information. What to do with that information is the function of our government. The output of the intelligence community is not the problem. The problem is how to react to the potential threats that intelligence uncovers. The problem is to pull the truth from a myriad of possibilities. That is a difficult problem. A shuffling of bureaucrats in the intelligence community is not going to solve it. There must be a middle ground between the two extremes we have seen. In the process, we need to increase our intelligence capabilities in order to increase the reliability of intelligence products.